Clif Hostetler's Reviews > Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

I interpret this book to be a satire of (1) secret societies based upon hidden wisdom from the past, and (2) modern computer analysis techniques operated by nerds who end up being just as gullible as those in the first group.

Our protagonist is an unemployed San Francisco computer programer who takes a job at a 24-hr book store in order to pay his rent. It’s a strange bookstore with few customers who can be divided into two groups, (1) normal people who wander in while waiting for the bus who are usually disappointed to find a limited selection of popular books, and (2) a small group of regulars who show up with algorithmic regularity at all hours of the day urgently requesting a particular old book from a strange collection high on the shelves in the back.

It doesn’t take long for our protagonist to figure out that those strange books they’re checking out (they don’t pay) are written entirely in code. He has a connection to the inner workings of Google and scans one of the books and then using computer analysis breaks the code. This reveals a small subset of secret knowledge. The big code is elsewhere.

The action then shifts to New York City where a secret society has for generations been dedicated to breaking the code left by 15th century printer Aldus Manutius. It is believed the code will reveal the secret to allow members of the society to live forever. Our protagonist with his friends from Google see the challenge of a code that needs to be broken and they throw all of Google’s super-computing power at the code and they do in several hours what would have taken thousands of secret society members working for thousands of years.

So what did all that super analysis discover about the code? Well, I’ll let you read the book for that information.

I found this to be an enjoyable easy to read book filled with snippets of humor (at one point a Google programer buys a NY Times newspaper and doesn’t know how to operate it so goes back to her phone).